SPEAK OUT is a youth collaborative project to create a digital open letter to our presidential administration.

SPEAK OUT encourages civic engagement among 6 to 12 year olds by prompting them to submit ideas to address prominent citizens’ issues as they most relate to kids’ lives. Community discussion and the democratic process are modeled by allowing kids to choose which ideas they like best. The ideas with the most votes are featured on pbskids.org/speakout in the form of a message to our President. This active, digital message will reflect the youth’s changing concerns and proposed solutions over time.

The project originally launched in tandem with the 2008 United States Presidential election.

Submissions to SPEAK OUT are eligible for the BigDialog.org collaboration, a cross-partisan partnership of academics, bloggers, and e-communities that invites the upcoming Presidential administration to answer questions from the public. Ideas and questions with the most votes from both sites will be jointly presented to the President-Elect.

How votes are counted.

Kid submitted "top ideas" are calculated by dividing the number of times the idea was voted for by the number of times it was part of a pair to vote on. Each voting pair is randomly created, supplying a higher percentage of unique situations to vote on and more chances for each submission to be seen.

Created in partnership with the National Black Programming Consortium's New Media Institute.